This inquiry centers on how and why Indian American immigrants engage with movies from their home country in a transnational global context. Extant literature has centered on lack of host language proficiency as the main reason for ethnic media consumption. It is proposed that for Indian Americans, the motivation for consuming Indian films is driven by ethnic performance rather than language proficiency. A survey was conducted with Indian Americans to examine the relationships among Indian movie consumption, acculturation indices, language proficiency, and ethnic performance. Results display that ethnic performance is a stronger predictor of Indian movie consumption than language proficiency and acculturation indices.